An Emasculated Abram
Abram Son of Terah.
by Florence Marvyne Bauer.
New York, Bobbs-Merrill, 1948. 406 pp. $3.00.
Miss Bauer’s housewifely archaeology has somehow concealed the fact that the story of Abram is a Jewish story. Abram as ancestral Jew, or as a particular Jew mysteriously selected to bear the burden of leadership, has been subverted to an average if hypersensitive young urbanite with a nostalgia for the farm. His adolescence is represented as the time of trial, and family bickering as the source of his strength and weakness; his alienation is understood to mean that his mother had no time for him. At the moment of the Covenant, when the myth begins to take on meaning for Jews, when ritual, law, and a sense of community in exile become part of a general fate, the novel is finished.
The Oedipal nature of Abram’s monotheism (which Miss Bauer traces in a thin straight line, with small benefit from the complication of Freud’s method) might have been a center from which to examine his reaction to all kinds of authority. Instead, his rebellion is treated as an irritable, monotonous wail against the indifference of the pagan gods and a prolonged coy resistance to Jah (Jehovah), but with the delicious eventual surrender always in sight.
The writer has a strong taste for submission, and in a dozen places obliterates the purpose of the submission in the aura of titillation that surrounds it. Her book is in many ways a melodrama of subordination: the king subjugates the royal guard, the priests the idolaters, the master his slaves, the legal wife the concubines, and so forth, and the impression sneaks in that there was something glamorous in these hierarchies.
Whatever was in fact important in the culture of Ur of the Chaldees gets no real consideration here. The profusion of shawls, dunghills, inheritances, taxes, and squabbles—all the paraphernalia that irrelevantly prove the “chemisms” of one period of history to be much like those of another—create a space in time neither ancient nor modem, but neutral, ready to bear the stamp of a subjective post-Christian piety. Thus, urban commerce, which is the only phenomenon that Abram Son of Terah describes with a certain vitality and pleasure, actually replaces the lechery of the usual historical novel. Shrewdness, usury, business sense, are not seen as elements of adaptability, but as the mark of corruption. Is there then some deliberate general implication in the fact that this corruption is attributed in one way or another to every member of Abram’s house?
Abram’s preference of Jah to the idols is itself on a partly commercial basis: Jah demanded no tithes, and reliably answered some very practical prayers. And this is as far as Miss Bauer goes in imagining Abram’s conception of a God who was for the first time social, an instrument for introducing new values and rituals, a new life. In her novel, Abram’s relation with this God is expressed in vapid trust. But the biblical Abram bargained with his God like a diplomat to spare Sodom for the sake of ten just men. Where is the scepticism of this extraordinary monotheist? We must remember how anxious Miss Bauer is to hide the fact that her Abram was extraordinary. A thousand naturalistic trappings are used to bring him closer, and in these minutiae is dissipated the power of the spare language of Genesis.
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